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The ground is baking hot, cracking and dry in the wake of Hamid’s fireball. Heat from the scorched earth rolls across the exposed skin of her neck and face, and the smooth handle of her blade is warm through the material when her glove finds it. Barret is cold though, still fresh from wherever they’ve dragged him, and he makes a satisfying little sound of surprise when her blade touches his throat.
She isn’t in the mood for his games, doesn’t care about what he’s saying, as much as it’s probably important given how interested Hamid seems. The Cult of Hades, it’s just more people to keep track of, more people to run from, more people she has to keep turning to check over her shoulder for. Even here, even now, in Damascus of all places, he persists. It always persists. If it’s not Barrett it’s Brock, or Eldarian, and she’s amazed Bi Ming hasn’t somehow been pulled into all of this yet, but the day’s still young - and Barret’s still talking. About things that don’t matter, that aren’t relevant right now, because the only thing that’s relevant is-
“What do they want?”
“Ah, there we go. Pretty certain they want what they’ve always wanted.” He’s as blase as ever, even with a dagger to his throat, and if she was still eight that might have impressed her, but now she’s just tired.
“Which is?” If Hamid’s voice keeps growing in pitch like that, Sasha is going to get seriously worried about it waking some of the dogs.
“I mean, the whole domination thing? Old habits.” And now she’s not listening anymore. Some more end of the world nonsense, huge cosmic disaster scale stuff that she doesn’t know or care or want to hear about. A new apocalypse to add to the to-do list. Your bog standard Thursday afternoon.
Barret says something superfluous and frustrating - she can see the briefest glimmer of irritation in Hamid’s features - and she draws the blade up closer into his throat, piercing the skin with the swedge.
“So these are the guys…” the Squizard, the Cult of Hades, the Serpentines, the Separatists, the whatever, the whoever, “they were there at the beginning so they…” Barret’s boys with the note, La Gormound, Brock and Rakefine and all of them, “this is after the Simulacrum was demonstrated and then…” peeking over a bannister, hiding inside an armoire, climbing barefoot over a palisade fence, “they’ve been around the whole time.”
“Oh, no. Much, much earlier than that. They were the ones who originally proposed the disappearing of all of the children in Other London, I suppose. Well, not all of the children, but you know what I mean.” Barret says it so casually that for a moment she doesn’t think she’s heard him right. But then her brain catches up and no, of course she’s heard him right, she shouldn’t still be being surprised by things like this, but she is. Maybe she just wants something about her to be kind of normal for one day. Sue her.
“No, I don’t.”
“Oh, you do.”
The boy with red hair who lives with his family in the flooded schoolhouse is watching her out of the ground floor window again. The boy with the missing front tooth who always throws rock at her when she passes, because she beat him in a dice game once and he doesn’t like her now. He’s scowling at her, but she only gets a glance at him out of the corner of her eye and then she’s hurrying on her way. She comes wandering back past a few hours later, but he’s gone. She never sees him or his brother again.
There’s a group of orphan kids with no official affiliation who gather outside the townhouse every morning to watch the lights turn on one by one. Barret tolerates them because they’ve never picked a fight with any of his employees, and they’ve taken to leaving offerings of bludgeoned rats on the path up to the entrance. There’s so many of them they’re often jostling for a spot, pressed right up against the wire fence, unfazed by the crossbows of the guards. Sasha comes out early one morning with some eel heads for the little ones, and finds just five or six bewildered faces staring back at her. They’re chewed up by the city in days.
When the girl who likes to run with the Rackets crawls out from underneath the fresh bedding pile, Sasha is smart enough to pretend to roll over in her sleep and leave her to it. She’s camped out in too many places that aren’t hers to get all up in arms about someone else doing the same. She ignores the girl digging through people’s pouches as soon as she determines it’s only food she’s after, but when the kid reaches towards Ashen’s purse, Sasha can’t help but hiss a warning at her. If the ankle-biter startles and treads on someone else’s hand, it’s hardly her fault, but the fingers end up pointed in her direction anyway. She only gets a week in confinement, but there’s talk of an example being made of the girl. She disappears the night before her punishment is due to be announced, and Barret doesn’t even seem all that mad about it.
“There was Rooftop Charlie…”
Sasha is ten years old, turned out of the townhouse for the night for ‘failure to adequately meet expectations’. She knows the rules by now; food and shelter until she’s let back in are her responsibility, but Barret has his boys keeping an eye out in case anyone takes their chances against a lone Racket. She’s wandering around, not so much lost as sulky and miserable, when a familiar face appears over the edge of a gable. Rooftop Charlie is a former boy of Barret’s, dismissed after an injury left him ‘unsuitable for work’. She wasn’t part of that team, but they’ve all heard the stories - he lost two of his fingers trying to disable a magical ward, then lost his eye refusing to tell the owners what he was looking for. As compensation for such a display of loyalty, Charlie’s allowed to live in Racket territory without fear of extortion or threat, and amongst Barret’s ranks he’s become something of a legend.
He welcomes her onto his choice roof of the week, shares half a rat and some berries with her, and spends the night regailing her with stories of his time as a runner. When she’s let back into her room, she gathers up a handful of coppers to give him as thanks, but every trace of his nest is gone and nobody around remembers the last time they saw him. Sasha knows better than to hope she’ll ever see him again either.
“I forget all their names…”
The twins who run the cobblers in the lower market, vanishing after closing up one night. The girl who takes on gangs of older boys for money in the square, staggering into the shadows and out of existence. The kids who live in the Sinking Church - always chasing each other between the gravestones and shrieking - more than halving in number overnight. Six boys and eleven girls disappearing from the barn after a bout of scarlet fever ripples through the orphan gangs.
“Oh, what was his name? Begins with a B.”
Sasha knows if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. And this story she’s being spun definitely seems too good to be true. Brock won’t stop going on about how this job is his ticket out, about how once the guards know his face he can come and go as he pleases, but it won’t be that easy. It can’t be that easy, or Barret wouldn’t just hand out jobs on the surface like that. “I’m not a Racket,” is the only thing he’ll say every time Sasha brings up how many ways this could go wrong, as if not being Barret’s flesh and blood somehow makes this safer instead of infinitely more dangerous. His plan, as far as he’s explained it, is simple - get up to the surface, steal as much as he can for as long as he can, get as far away from London as possible, find somewhere to live, and then come back for her. It doesn't sound at all that simple to Sasha, given that Upper London is apparently thousands of times bigger than Other London before they even get to the rest of the world, but Brock has an answer for that too. He’s going to do a few little surface errands, case out the area before he gets sent on anything serious. Sasha tries to tell him he can’t case the entire world before coming to get her, but he promises he won’t. Only a little bit of London and then the coast. He doesn’t seem too sure on what a coast is, except for maybe a big river bank, but he’s pretty certain it’ll get him as far away as he needs. He’s not stupid but he is hopeful, and to Sasha those two things are the same, so she gives up trying to dissuade him, and instead writes a list of questions about the surface. He has his first Upper London job two days later, and returns with a stolen notebook full of hastily scrawled answers for her, most of which are unsatisfactory for calming her worries. He does four Upper London jobs in total, returning from each one with more of his plan in place, and never comes back from his fifth. He’s missing for over a decade, until Sasha finds his brain in a vat under Paris, pumping out endless calculations and laughing with her about weighted dice.
“Look-” Barret’s voice shakes her out of her thoughts, “they’ve been advising on matters for a long time. I don’t know what else to say, I can’t give you thirty years of administration.”
Thirty years. That’s about as long as Barret’s been the one in charge of the empire. She never met Martev’s brother, but if he’s anything like his son, it’s entirely possible the squizards were his little project - she can’t picture Barret outsourcing like that, giving up so much power. But if the Cult have been involved in Racket affairs since before she was born, then clearly he has been, and for a while.
“Give us the edited highlights from the incident with the Serpentine gang, whatever they were called, until now. I want to know how your relationship with them has changed over the last three to six months.” Hamid is just steamrollering on, but Sasha can’t. Her brain is still tumbling through her past, unearthing long forgotten faces like shaking out a dust sheet.
“And you provided them brains and you knew that the brains were going…” she can’t finish the sentence. To that hell, to that awful awful cavern, and she could live maybe knowing that Brock had just gotten unlucky, but there were hundreds and hundreds of the children she had grown up with trapped in that colossal whirring thing.
“No, I didn’t.”
“to the…” That thing. That horrible horrible thing, with its chambers and its memories and its food.
“No. I didn’t.”
“You provided them people.” Hamid compromises, as if that distinction does anything to fill in the gaping hole boring its way through Sasha’s chest.
“Yes, I did.”
“Who were made into brain fuel.” Stallholders, children with big eyes, toll guards and teenagers and her friends. Sent away, robbed of their lives, their brains, themselves. Forced to be moving parts in a much bigger machine.
“Okay.”
“And you knew that.”
“No.”
The idea that anything of that scale could get past Barret almost makes her want to laugh. “I’m sure you knew.” La Gormound had probably been feeding his own runts of the litter into the thing too, scorched earth purification style.
“Maybe he didn’t know.” Hamid’s attempt at pacifying her is falling on deaf ears. He had to have known. There’s nothing that happens in Other London that he doesn’t know about. One of his agents so much as sneezes and it gets back to him in minutes. “But more he didn’t care.”
“More accurate, more accurate, yes.” Of course he didn’t care, why would he care, what would less mouths to feed and less hands to keep track of weigh up against the life of a human being to someone like Barret. The idea that shipping living people en masse is of so little consequence to him that he doesn’t bother to ask where they’re going as long as they’re out of his way exhumes a horror in Sasha so cavernous she wonders for a moment if it’s going to consume her alive. He doesn’t care, and Sasha’s always known that, of course she has, but the scale of his not-caring runs far far deeper than she could ever have assumed, and though her brain has already accepted it as simple truth, her body seems to twitch and jitter with the shock.
“Look, as it stands…” Barret continues, but they can’t just breeze past this. She can’t just breeze past this. All those years she’d spent, worrying and wondering about Brock, about the smallest boys and the youngest girls, about those who just up and disappeared into the night, and he doesn’t even remember their names.
“No. No, no no.” Sasha shakes her head, removing the point of her dagger from his jugular notch. If she’s around him for another second she’s going to slit his throat, and he’s actually being somewhat helpful right now, so as much as she’d like to, that’s going to have to wait. She walks away without looking back, casting her gaze over the moonlit city, and tries to ignore the trembling wracking its way up through her core. At least they shut it down, she tells herself. At least they’re free now, those people. All of them.
If she carries one comfort with her through whatever comes next, it will be that one.